Category: Uncategorized

 “Honest and real”: powerful new book revealing the humanity inside Iran to receive its first UK launch in Lincoln 

Wednesday 30th September 2026, 6.00pm
International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious, a moving account of everyday life in Iran during war, will receive its first UK public launch at the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln on Wednesday 30th September 2026 at 6.00pm.

Written by acclaimed Iranian author Ali Seidabadi and published in the UK by Nick Owen Publishing, the book takes readers beyond political statements, military briefings and news headlines to reveal how war is experienced by ordinary people.

Through intimate observations of families, friendships and daily life, it records the fear and uncertainty created by attacks. At the same time, it celebrates the courage, hospitality and resilience of Iran’s people, and recalls the beauty of the Persian culture and landscape. Meals are shared, families gather, friendships endure and, in the quieter moments, birds continue to sing. 

At its heart, this book is an appeal for peace. It underlines the ultimate futility of war and reminds us that behind every account of military action are communities attempting to preserve ordinary life.

Join us at the UK Launch at International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln on 30 September!

What the reviewers say:

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious has received powerful early praise. Dariush Karimi, lead presenter at BBC Persian, describes it as:

A compelling personal account of a period we heard about but did not experience firsthand. His narrative is impressively intimate yet objective; by maintaining a composed tone and avoiding excessive sentimentality, he portrays the traumatic days of the war very effectively” 

American author and editor Michelle Houts says that it reveals “the side of war we don’t see”, praising Ali for showing “the world the humanity inside Iran. This is not an easy book to read. But it’s honest and real… Ali, keep using your pen to show the world the humanity inside Iran.”

Poet Liz Fincham describes it as “profound, passionate, poetic” and “essential reading for these times”, adding: “I think it will be one of the books that will change my life.”

Why International Bomber Command Centre as the venue?

International Bomber Command Centre are delighted to be chosen as the venue for the launch. As a place committed to remembrance, reflection and reconciliation, the Centre offers an important setting in which to consider the continuing human consequences of war. The event will connect historical memory with the experiences of people living through conflict today and invite audiences to look beyond the language of strategy and weaponry to the lives changed beneath them.

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War (HARD COVER)

For the paperback version, click below:

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War (PAPERBACK)

 For the e-book version, click below:

If you would rather order a physical book through your preferred bookshops, you can quote both the name of the book or the relevant ISBN numbers:

Hardcover: ISBN          9798197042132

Paperback: ISBN         9798180483287

About the author

Ali Asghar Seidabadi is an Iranian researcher, author, and a well-known cultural figure. His newspaper columns and books for both adults and children are widely read and he is regularly invited to speak at various events and institutions and he frequently give interviews to non-governmental media outlets. During the 1990s, widely regarded as the golden age of Iranian journalism, Seidabadi became a well-known figure in Iran’s cultural and journalistic spheres. He was responsible for the culture, arts, and thought sections of several widely read reformist newspapers and later became a member of their editorial boards. Alongside his journalistic work, he wrote books for children and young adults and conducted research in children’s literature, reading promotion, and cultural studies.

In When The Sparrows Grow Anxious, Seidabadi brings that literary sensibility to bear on lived experience. The book is observant, humane and disciplined. It is marked by attention to small details, an instinct for connection and an unwavering commitment to nonviolence.

This is a diary by someone who understands the importance of stories — not as escape, but as a way of preserving human dignity when the surrounding world becomes frighteningly unstable.

You can find more information here.

For further information, please leave your contact details here and we will get straight back to you:

Email:     nick@nickowenpublishing.co.uk
Website: www.nickowenpublishing.com

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War
Author: Ali Asghar Seidabadi
Publisher: Nick Owen Publishing Ltd
Publication: 15 June 2026
ISBN: 9798197042132
Format: [Hardback / Paperback / Kindle / eBook)
Available from: Nick Owen Publishing / Amazon

#WhenTheSparrowsGrowAnxious

#DiariesFromTehran

#BooksBuildBridges

“Words written while the bombs were still falling.”

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious:  Diaries from Tehran at War offers an intimate, humane and urgent record of ordinary life under bombardment and is now available to readers across the world in all formats.

Written by Ali Asghar Seidabadi, an acclaimed Iranian researcher, author, and a well-known cultural figure, this extraordinary diary-style work offers readers a rare, immediate and deeply human account of life in Tehran during war, bombardment and internet disruption.

Written originally as daily notes for international friends and literary colleagues, the book records not only fear, uncertainty and danger, but also the fragile continuities of everyday life: taped windows, family calls, cafés, bookshops, food, birds, interrupted communications and the small rituals by which people continue to live while history presses against the glass.

Seidabadi‘s work is a work of witness:  intimate, precise, restrained and morally alert. At its heart is a voice committed to a “middle path”: nonviolent, humane, neither propagandist nor self-pitying. In a world often divided by slogans, suspicion and noise, When The Sparrows Become Anxious insists on the importance of listening to an individual human being trying to describe what it feels like to endure.

For the hard cover version, you can click here:

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War (HARD COVER)

For the paperback version, you can click here:

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War (PAPERBACK)

 If you prefer to buy their copy through Amazon, you can buy hard cover, paperback or e-book by clicking here:

If you would rather order a physical book through your preferred bookshops, you can quote both the name of the book or the relevant ISBN numbers:

Hardcover: ISBN          9798197042132

Paperback: ISBN         9798180483287

A diary of war, culture and human endurance

The title’s image of anxious sparrows captures the emotional force of the book: small lives continuing amid forces far larger than themselves. Through that recurring motif, Seidabadi turns the daily experience of conflict into something both specific and universal.

The diary is rooted in Tehran, but its reach is international. As a writer and editor with deep connections across global children’s and young adult literature, Seidabadi writes from within a network of friendships, correspondence and cultural solidarity. His messages to writers, illustrators and book people beyond Iran become part of the book’s emotional architecture.What emerges is a record of war seen not through military strategy or state rhetoric, but through culture, family, memory and daily survival.

Readers encounter a city under pressure, but also a mind refusing to surrender its clarity. The result is a book that speaks powerfully to anyone interested in contemporary history, human rights, international literature, peace, cultural memory and the moral role of writing in times of crisis.

About the author

Ali Asghar Seidabadi is an Iranian researcher, author, and a well-known cultural figure. His newspaper columns and books for both adults and children are widely read and he is regularly invited to speak at various events and institutions and he frequently give interviews to non-governmental media outlets. During the 1990s, widely regarded as the golden age of Iranian journalism, Seidabadi became a well-known figure in Iran’s cultural and journalistic spheres. He was responsible for the culture, arts, and thought sections of several widely read reformist newspapers and later became a member of their editorial boards. Alongside his journalistic work, he wrote books for children and young adults and conducted research in children’s literature, reading promotion, and cultural studies.

In When The Sparrows Grow Anxious, Seidabadi brings that literary sensibility to bear on lived experience. The book is observant, humane and disciplined. It is marked by attention to small details, an instinct for connection and an unwavering commitment to nonviolence.

This is a diary by someone who understands the importance of stories — not as escape, but as a way of preserving human dignity when the surrounding world becomes frighteningly unstable.

You can find more information here.

Publisher Nick Owen MBE, founder of Nick Owen Publishing, said:

“At a time when the President of the USA can assert “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again…” Ali Asghar Seidabadi has written a book of huge courage. These diary notes attend to the human texture of war:  to windows, birds, phone calls, friendships, children’s books, and the stubborn persistence of ordinary life. That is precisely why the book matters and why we are honoured to bring his work to a wider, global public.”

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious is an important and timely publication because it offers something urgently needed: a human-scale account of war from inside the experience itself. It explores the cultural infrastructure of Iran through these diary notes, sometimes prompted by remarks made by President Trump.   It shows that some forms of Iranian behaviour and social response,  which may appear strange or incomprehensible to President Trump and to many people around the world, have deep mythological roots.

For further information, please leave your contact details here and we will get straight back to you:

Email:     nick@nickowenpublishing.co.uk
Website: www.nickowenpublishing.com

When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War
Author: Ali Asghar Seidabadi
Publisher: Nick Owen Publishing Ltd
Publication: 15 June 2026
ISBN: 9798197042132
Format: [Hardback / Paperback / Kindle / eBook)
Available from: Nick Owen Publishing / Amazon

#WhenTheSparrowsGrowAnxious

#DiariesFromTehran

#BooksBuildBridges

From: Julian Pilkington-Sterne, Temporary Clay-Court Continuity Officer and Acting Attaché for Franco-British Sporting Delusion
Subject: Roland-Garros, Monday 25 May 2026 — Heat, Farewells, French Theatrics and the Ongoing Norman Question

Dearest readers,

It is my burden to report that Day Two of the French Open unfolded in conditions of such heat that Paris briefly appeared to have been annexed by a pizza oven. The clay glowed. The crowd simmered. The players shimmered. One half expected a goat to wander across Court Philippe-Chatrier carrying a tricolore and a grievance.

There was, from the beginning, a definite sense that the tournament had entered its Norman phase: uncertain loyalties, ancient rivalries, English discomfort, French emotional grandeur, and several people marching towards defeat with the misplaced confidence of minor aristocrats.

You can hear my match report here:

The great emotional ceremony of the day belonged to Gaël Monfils, who played what became his final Roland-Garros match. Against Hugo Gaston, Monfils went two sets down, rose magnificently from the administrative dead, summoned Paris into a state of collective theatre, and then lost the fifth set 6-0, which even Julian must admit is a slightly abrupt way to end an epic.

Still, this was not really a defeat. It was a French ending. Which is to say: tragic, stylish, overlit, emotionally expensive, and followed by applause.

Stan Wawrinka, too, departed the Parisian scene, beaten by Jesper de Jong. Wawrinka’s backhand, once less a shot than a medieval siege engine, was honoured with due reverence. He leaves Roland-Garros as a former champion, a clay-court nobleman, and one of the few men whose single-handed backhand appeared capable of settling territorial disputes in northern France.

Then came Iga Swiatek, who treated young Emerson Jones with the brisk efficiency of a customs officer unimpressed by imaginative paperwork. Swiatek won 6-1, 6-2, and reminded everyone that while others play Roland-Garros, she appears to occupy it under hereditary right.

The day’s principal upset came when Polish qualifier Maja Chwalinska defeated Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen 6-4, 6-0. This was unexpected, decisive and faintly absurd, all the qualities one looks for in both tennis and poorly planned cross-Channel adventures. Zheng entered as a figure of authority; Chwalinska left as if she had just seized a minor duchy.

British interests, always delicate on clay, produced one moment of relief. Katie Boulter defeated Akasha Urhobo 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, which should be formally recorded as a win, a survival, and quite possibly an act of weather-based diplomacy. British tennis on clay often resembles an Englishman attempting to eat soup with a fork while apologising to the bowl, so this was no small matter.

Young Toby Samuel, meanwhile, faced Alex de Minaur and discovered, as many do, that de Minaur is not so much a tennis player as a polite Australian electrical current. Samuel lost 6-4, 6-4, 6-2, but showed enough resistance to suggest that he may yet return to the clay better armed, better hydrated, and less surprised by velocity.

Casper Ruud provided the day’s most medically questionable triumph, beating Roman Safiullin 6-2, 7-6, 5-7, 0-6, 6-2after missing match points, receiving treatment, apparently mislaying several limbs, and then remembering in the fifth set that he is, in fact, Casper Ruud at Roland-Garros. It was less a tennis match than a Scandinavian morality play about the dangers of assuming the paperwork is complete.

Elsewhere, the seeded classes proceeded with varying degrees of authority. Elena Rybakina advanced efficiently. Amanda Anisimova moved through cleanly. Ben Shelton progressed with force. Andrey Rublev survived, as Rublev often does, by appearing to conduct both the match and a private argument with the universe.

But the spirit of the day remained French, Norman, theatrical and faintly unstable. There were farewells, collapses, resurrections, heat warnings, national anxieties, and the constant suspicion that somewhere just beyond the umpire’s chair, history itself was shrugging in a beret.

Day Two of Roland-Garros offered everything required of a proper clay-court episode: veterans leaving under emotional escort, favourites behaving like occupying forces, qualifiers launching small rebellions, British players negotiating with the surface, and the French crowd transforming ordinary sport into opera with line judges.

In summary: Monfils departed like a tragic prince, Wawrinka bowed out like a cannon being retired, Swiatek issued a memorandum of dominance, Chwalinska conquered unexpectedly, Boulter survived honourably, and Ruud completed what can only be described as a five-set pilgrimage through personal inconvenience.

The red clay is now fully awake.

The English remain nervous.

The French are enjoying themselves far too much.

And somewhere, faintly but unmistakably, a goat is laughing.